CHAPTER V
The gravity of the French character is a no less remarkable (though a less obvious) feature in it than its levity. The last is the quality that strikes us most by contrast to ourselves, and that comes most into play in the intercourse of common life; and therefore we are generally disposed to set them down as an altogether frivolous and superficial people. It is a mistake which we shall do well to correct on farther acquaintance with them; or if we persist in it, we must call to our aid an extraordinary degree of our native blindness and obstinacy. We ought never to visit their Theatres, to walk along their streets, to enter their houses, to look in their faces (when they do not think themselves observed,) to open their books, or take a view of their picture-galleries. Sterne seems to have been the first, as well as last traveller, who found out their weak side in this respect. ‘If the French have a fault, Monsieur le Comte,’ says he, ‘it is that they are too serious.’ This contradiction in their character has been little noticed, and they have never had the credit of it, though it stares one in the face everywhere. How we are to piece the two extremes together is another question. Is it that their whole character is a system of inconsequentiality? Or are they gay and trifling in serious matters, serious only in trifles? Or are their minds more of the cameleon-cast, that reflects all objects alike, whether grave or gay, and give themselves up entirely, and without resistance, to the prevailing impulse? Or is it owing to a want of comprehension, so that they are incapable of correcting one feeling by another, and thus run into extremes? Or that they have a greater scope and variety of resources, excelling us as much in gravity as in want of thought, outdoing us in tragedy and comedy, as they betake themselves to each, in the poetical or in the prosaic departments of life, only that they sometimes make a transposition of the two characters a little oddly, and pass from the one to the other without our well knowing why?
I have been frequently puzzled with this exception to the butterfly, airy, thoughtless, fluttering character of the French (on which we compliment ourselves,) and never more so than the first night I went to the theatre. The order, the attention, the decorum were such as would shame any London audience. The attention was more like that of a learned society to a lecture on some scientific subject, than of a promiscuous crowd collected together merely for amusement, and to pass away an idle hour. There was a professional air, an unvarying gravity in the looks and demeanour of the whole assembled multitude, as if every one had an immediate interest in the character of the national poetry, in the purity of the French accent, in the propriety of the declamation, in the conceptions of the actor, and the developement of the story, instead of its presenting a mob of idle boys and girls, of ignorant gaping citizens, or supercilious box-lobby loungers, affecting a contempt for the performance, and for every one around them. The least noise or irregularity called forth the most instant and lively disapprobation; and the vivacity of the French character displayed itself to advantage in earnest gesticulations and expressions of impatience. Not only was the strictest silence observed, as soon as the curtain drew up, but no one moved or attempted to move. The spell thrown over the customary or supposed restlessness and volatility of the French was in this respect complete. The uniformity of the appearance was indeed almost ridiculous; for the rows of heads in the seats of the pit no more stirred or projected the breadth of a finger beyond the line, than those of a regiment of recruits on parade, or than if a soldier were stationed to keep each chin in its place. They may be reduced to the state of automatons; but there were no traces of the monkey character left.[[17]] If the performance had been at Court, greater propriety could not have been maintained; but it was a French play (one of Racine’s) and acted before a Parisian audience: this seemed to be enough to ensure it a proper reception. One would suppose, from their interest in dramatic representations, that the French were a nation of actors. Perhaps it may be asked, ‘Is not that the case? and is it not their vanity, their own desire to shine, or their sympathy with whatever or whoever is a candidate for applause, that accounts for their behaviour?’ At least, their vanity makes them grave; and if it is this which rivets their attention, and silences their eternal loquacity, it must be allowed to produce effects which others would do well to imitate from better motives, if they have them![[18]]
The play was not much; but there seemed to be an abstract interest felt in the stage as such, in the sound of the verse, in the measured step of the actors, in the recurrence of the same pauses, and of the same ideas; in the correctness of the costume, in the very notion of the endeavour after excellence, and in the creation of an artificial and imaginary medium of thought. If the French are more susceptible of immediate, sensible impressions, it would appear, judging from their behaviour at their own theatres, that they are also more sensible of reflex and refined ones. The bare suggestion of an interesting topic is to them interesting: it may be said, on the most distant intimation, to excite the most lively concern, and to collect their scattered spirits into a focus. Their sensibility takes the alarm more easily; their understanding is quicker of hearing. With them, to the sublime or pathetic there is but one step—the name; the moment the subject is started, they ‘jump at’ the catastrophe and all the consequences. We are slow, and must have a thing made out to us in striking instances, and by successive blows. We are sluggish, and must be lifted up to the heights of a factitious enthusiasm by the complicated machinery of a powerful imagination: we are obstinate, not to say selfish, and require to be urged over the abyss of mental anguish by the utmost violence of terror and pity. But with the French, all this is a matter of course, a verbal process. Tears, as well as smiles, cost them less than they do us. Words are more nearly allied to things in their minds; the one have a more vital being, though it does not follow that the other are altogether empty and barren of interest. But the French seem (in their dramatic exhibitions) not to wish to get beyond, or (shall I speak it more plainly?) to have no faculty for getting beyond the abstract conception, the naked proposition of the subject. They are a people (I repeat it) void and bare of the faculty of imagination, if by this we mean the power of placing things in the most novel and striking point of view; and they are so for this reason, that they have no need of it. It is to them a superfluity—a thankless toil. Their quick, discursive apprehension runs on before, and anticipates and defeats the efforts of the highest poetry. They are contented to indulge in all the agony or ecstacy of sounding and significant common-places. The words charming, delicious, indescribable, &c. excite the same lively emotions in their minds as the most vivid representations of what is said to be so; and hence verbiage and the cant of sentiment fill the place, and stop the road to genius—a vague, flaccid, enervated rhetoric being too often substituted for the pith and marrow of truth and nature. The greatest facility to feel or to comprehend will not produce the most intense passion, or the most electrical expression of it. There must be a resistance in the matter to do this—a collision, an obstacle to overcome. The torrent rushes with fury from being impeded in its course: the lightning splits the gnarled oak. There is no malice in this statement; but I should think they may themselves allow it to be an English version of the truth, containing a great deal that is favourable to them, with a saving clause for our own use. The long (and to us tiresome) speeches in French tragedy consist of a string of emphatic and well-balanced lines, announcing general maxims and indefinite sentiments applicable to human life. The poet seldom commits any excesses by giving way to his own imagination, or identifying himself with individual situations and sufferings. We are not now raised to the height of passion, now plunged into its lowest depths; the whole finds its level, like water, in the liquid, yielding susceptibility of the French character, and in the unembarrassed scope of the French intellect. The finest line in Racine, that is, in French poetry, is by common consent understood to be the following:—
Craignez Dieu, mon cher Abner, et ne craignez que Dieu.
That is, Fear God, my dear Abner, and fear only him. A pious and just exhortation, it is true; but, when this is referred to as the highest point of elevation to which their dramatic genius has aspired, though we may not be warranted in condemning their whole region of poetry as a barren waste, we may consider it as very nearly a level plain, and assert, that though the soil contains mines of useful truths within its bosom and glitters with the graces of a polished style, it does not abound in picturesque points of view or romantic interest! It is certain that a thousand such lines would have no effect upon an English audience but to set them to sleep, like a sermon, or to make them commence a disturbance to avoid it. Yet, though the declamation of the French stage is as monotonous as the dialogue, the French listen to it with the tears in their eyes, holding in their breath, beating time to the cadence of the verse, and following the actors with a book in their hands for hours together. The English most assuredly do not pay the same attention to a play of Shakspeare’s, or to any thing but a cock-fight or a sparring-match. This is no great compliment to them; but it makes for the gravity of the French, who have mistaken didactic for dramatic poetry, who can sit out a play with the greatest patience and complacency, that an Englishman would hoot off the stage, or yawn over from beginning to end for its want of striking images and lively effect, and with whom Saturn is a God no less than Mercury! I am inclined to suspect the genius of their religion may have something to do with the genius of their poetry. The first absorbs in a manner their powers of imagination, their love of the romantic and the marvellous, and leaves the last in possession of their sober reason and moral sense. Their churches are theatres; their theatres are like churches. Their fancies are satiated with the mummeries and pageantry of the Catholic faith, with hieroglyphic obscurity and quaint devices; and, when they come to the tangible ground of human affairs, they are willing to repose alike from ornament and extravagance, in plain language and intelligible ideas. They go to mass in the morning to dazzle their senses, and bewilder their imagination, and inflame their enthusiasm; and they resort to the theatre in the evening to seek relief from superstitious intoxication in the prose of poetry, and from Gothic mysteries and gloom, in classic elegance and costume. Be this as it may, the love of the French for Racine is not a feeling of the moment, or left behind them at the theatres; they can quote him by heart, and his sententious, admirable lines occupy the next place in their minds to their amatory poetry. There is nothing unpleasant in a French theatre but a certain infusion of soup-maigre into the composition of the air, (so that one inhales a kind of thin pottage,) and an oily dinginess in the complexions both of the men and women, which shews more by lamp-light. It is not true (as has been said) that their theatres are nearly dark, or that the men stand in the pit. It is true, none but men are admitted into it, but they have seats just the same as with us, and a curious custom of securing their places when they go out, by binding their handkerchiefs round them, so that at the end of the play the benches presented nothing but a row of knotted pocket handkerchiefs. Almost every one returned and sat out the entertainment, which was not a farce, but a sentimental comedy, and a very charming one too, founded on the somewhat national subject of a seduction by an English nobleman in France, and in which the fair sufferer was represented by a young debutante, in natural expression and pathos little inferior to Miss Kelly, (as far as we can translate French into English nature,) but fatter and prettier. So much for their taste in theatricals, which does not incline wholly to puppet-shows and gew-gaws. The Theatre, in short, is the Throne of the French character, where it is mounted on its pedestal of pride, and seen to every advantage. I like to contemplate it there, for it reconciles me to them and to myself. It is a common and amicable ground on which we meet. Their tears are such as others shed—their interest in what happened three thousand years ago is not exclusively French. They are no longer a distinct race or caste, but human beings. To feel towards others as of a different species, is not the way to increase our respect for ourselves or human nature. Their defects and peculiarities, we may be almost sure, have corresponding opposite vices in us—the excellences are confined pretty much to what there is in common.
The ordinary prejudice entertained on this subject in England is, that the French are little better than grown children—
‘Pleas’d with a feather—tickled with a straw—’
full of grimace and noise and shew, lively and pert, but with no turn or capacity for serious thought or continued attention of any kind, and hardly deserving the name of rational beings, any more than apes or jackdaws. They may laugh and talk more than the English; but they read, and, I suspect, think more, taking them as a people. You see an apple-girl in Paris, sitting at a stall with her feet over a stove in the coldest weather, or defended from the sun by an umbrella, reading Racine or Voltaire. Who ever saw such a thing in London as a barrow-woman reading Shakspeare or Fielding? You see a handsome, smart grisette at the back of every little shop or counter in Paris, if she is not at work, reading perhaps one of Marmontel’s Tales, with all the absorption and delicate interest of a heroine of romance. Yet we make doleful complaints of the want of education among the common people, and of the want of reflection in the female character in France. There is something of the same turn for reading in Scotland; but then where is the gaiety or the grace? They are more sour and formal even than the English. The book-stalls all over Paris present a very delightful appearance. They contain neatly-bound, cheap, and portable editions of all their standard authors, which of itself refutes the charge of a want of the knowledge or taste for books. The French read with avidity whenever they can snatch the opportunity. They read standing in the open air, into which they are driven by the want of air at home. They read in garrets and in cellars. They read at one end of a counter, when a person is hammering a lock or a piece of cabinet-work at the other, without taking their eye from the book, or picking a quarrel with the person who is making the noise. Society is the school of education in France; there is a transparency in their intellects as in their atmosphere, which makes the communication of thought or sound more rapid and general. The farina of knowledge floats in the air, and circulates at random. Alas! it ‘quickens, even with blowing.’ A periwig-maker is an orator; a fish-woman is a moralist; a woman of fashion is a metaphysician, armed with all the topics; a pretty woman in Paris, who was not also a blue-stocking, would make little figure in the circles. It would be in vain for her to know how to dispose a knot of ribands or a bunch of flowers in her hair, unless she could arrange a critical and analytical argument in all the forms. It is nothing against her, if she excels in personal and mental accomplishments at the same time. This turn for literary or scientific topics in the women may indeed be accounted for in part from the modes of social intercourse in France; but what does this very circumstance prove, but that an interchange of ideas is considered as one great charm in the society between men and women, and that the thirst of knowledge is not banished by a grosser passion? Knowledge and reason, however, descend; and where the women are philosophers, the men are not quite block-heads or petit-maitres. They are far from being the ignorant smatterers that we pretend. They are not backward at asking for reasons, nor slow in giving them. They have a theory for every thing, even for vice and folly. Their faces again are grave and serious when they are by themselves, as they are gay and animated in society. Their eyes have a vacant, absent stare; their features set or lengthen all at once into ‘the melancholy of Moorditch.’ The Conducteur of the Diligence from Rouen confirmed me agreeably in my theory of the philosophical character of the French physiognomy. With large grey eyes and drooping eye-lids, prominent distended nostrils, a fine Fenelon expression of countenance, and a mouth open and eloquent, with furrowed lines twisted round it like whip-cord, he stood on the steps of the coach, and harangued to the gentlemen within on the bêtise of some voyageur Anglois with the air of a professor, and in a deep sonorous voice, worthy of an oration of Bossuet. I should like to hear a Yorkshire guard, with his bluff, red face, bristly bullet head, little peering eyes, round shoulders, and squeaking voice, ascend into an imaginary rostrum in this manner, wave a florid speculation in one hand, and hold fast by the coach-door with the other, or get beyond an oath, a hearty curse, or his shrewd country gibberish! The face of the French soldiery is a face of great humanity—it is manly, sedate, thoughtful—it is equally free from fierceness and stupidity; and it seems to bear in its eye defeat and victory, the eagle and the lilies! I cannot help adding here, that a French gentleman (un Rentier) who lodges in the hotel opposite to me, passes his time in reading all the morning, dines, plays with his children after dinner, and takes a hand at backgammon with an old gouvernante in the evening. He does not figure away with a couple of horses in the streets like our English jockeys (who really are nothing without a footman behind them,) nor does his wife plague his life out to run after all the new sights. And yet they are from the country. This looks like domestic comfort and internal resources. How many disciples of Rousseau’s Emilius are there in France at the present day? I knew one twenty years ago.
The French are a people who practise the arts and sciences naturally. A shoe-black is the artiste du jour (artist of the day,) and a rat-catcher approaches you under some insidious nom de guerre. Every thing is with them imposing, grave, important. ‘Except (it may be said) what really is so;’ and it may be insinuated, that all their pretensions are equally idly mockery and grimace. Look, then, at their works of science and of art—the one the most comprehensive and exact, the other the most laborious and finished in the world. What are their chemists, their astronomers, their naturalists, their painters, their sculptors? If not the greatest and most inventive geniuses, the most accurate compilers, and the most severe students in their several departments. La Place, Lavoisier, Cuvier, David, Houdon, are not triflers or pretenders. In science, if we have discovered the principles, they have gone more into the details—in art we accuse them of being over-laboured, and of finishing too minutely and mechanically; and they charge us (justly enough) with a want of finesse, and with producing little more than rude sketches and abortive caricatures. Their frigid, anatomical inquiries—their studies after the antique, and acquaintance with all the professional and scientific branches of their art, are notorious—and the care with which they work up their draperies and back-grounds is obvious to every one, and a standing subject of complaint and ridicule to English artists and critics. Their refinement in art, I confess, consists chiefly in an attention to rules and details, but then it does imply an attention to these, which is contrary to our idea of the flighty French character. I remember, some years ago, a young French artist in the Louvre, who was making a chalk-drawing of a small Virgin and Child, by Leonardo da Vinci, and he took eleven weeks to complete it, sitting with his legs astride over a railing, looking up and talking to those about him—consulting their opinion as to his unwearied imperceptible progress—going to the fire to warm his hands, and returning to perfectionate himself! There was a good deal of ‘laborious foolery’ in all this, but still he kept on with it, and did not fly to fifty things one after the other. Another student had undertaken to copy the Titian’s Mistress, and the method he took to do it was to parcel out his canvass into squares like an engraver; after which he began very deliberately, not with the face or hair, but with the first square in the right-hand corner of the picture, containing a piece of an old table. He did not care where he began, so that he went through the whole regularly. C’est égal, is the common reply in all such cases. This continuity of purpose, without any great effort or deep interest, surprises an Englishman. We can do nothing without a strong motive, and without violent exertion. But it is this very circumstance probably that enables them to proceed: they take the matter quite easily, and have not the same load of anxious thought to bear up against, nor the same impatient eagerness to reach perfection at a single stride, to stop them midway. They have not the English air hanging at their backs, like the Old Man of the Sea at Sinbad’s! The same freedom from any thing like morbid humour assists them to plod on like the Dutch from mere phlegm, or to diverge into a variety of pursuits, which is still more natural to them. Horace Vernet has in the present Exhibition a portrait of a lady, (a rival to Sir T. Lawrence’s) and close to it, a battle-piece, equal to Ward or Cooper. Who would not be a Parisian born, to attain excellence with the wish to succeed from mere confidence or indifference to success, to unite such a number of accomplishments, or be equally satisfied without a single one!
The English are over-hasty in supposing a certain lightness and petulance of manner in the French to be incompatible with sterling thought or steady application, and flatter themselves that not to be merry is to be wise. A French lady who had married an Englishman remarkable for his dullness, used to apologise for his silence in company by incessantly repeating ‘C’est toujours Locke, toujours Newton,’ as if these were the subjects that occupied his thoughts. It is well we have these names to appeal to in all cases of emergency; and as far as mere gravity is concerned, let these celebrated persons have been as wise as they would, they could not for the life of them have appeared duller or more stupid than the generality of their countrymen. The chief advantage I can find in the English over the French comes to this, that though slower, if they once take a thing up, they are longer in laying it down, provided it is a grievance or a sore subject. The reason is, that the French do not delight in grievances or in sore subjects; and that the English delight in nothing else, and battle their way through them most manfully. Their forte is the disagreeable and repulsive. I think they would have fought the battle of Waterloo over again! The English, besides being ‘good haters,’ are dogged and downright, and have no salvos for their self-love. Their vanity does not heal the wounds made in their pride. The French, on the contrary, are soon reconciled to fate, and so enamoured of their own idea, that nothing can put them out of conceit with it. Whatever their attachment to their country, to liberty or glory, they are not so affected by the loss of these as to make any desperate effort or sacrifice to recover them. Their continuity of feeling is such, as to be no enemy to a whole skin. They over-ran Europe like tigers, and defended their own territory like deer. They are a nation of heroes—on this side of martyrdom!